Comment by alexgoodhart
2 days ago
Because Claude wrote the linked page. Claude is impressively bad at communicating these days. with gpt-5.6+ approaching Claude level like 30% of time and Gemini much clearer but also the most annoying 7 year old ever, it’s a pretty lame environment especially for people who r new to everything
I wondered about this myself as the explanations and documents I have been maintaining are becoming increasingly 'slop', but a different kind of slop.
In the past I could get an explanation, where I was able to track the line of thought. Now when I read through the explanation it is like someone has taken two or three explanations and merged them into each other, like there is a combining of iterations without clarity.
example:
The tree is blue.
The tall tree has the color of blue.
the tree, while tall, is blue.
That finally gets squished into: the blue tall tree has height and is evident of blue.
Is this double speak or injected double effort of words?
Until Opus 5.0 I'd have agreed with you, but Opus 5.5 is honestly one of the best I've ever sparred with, vastly better than the rest, including Astra imho. Especially so when prompting for clear top-down, first-principles communication.
Disagree, I review a lot of Opus 5.5 code and its comments and docs are still pretty inane and Claudish. Is it better than the 4.x and 5.0 era, sure. But it's still nouning the verbs, using colons everywhere, a-not-b, "a foos the b" etc. A lot of lingual knots that need a human hand to untie.
Opus 5.5 is much better, but IME I always have to force it to review its writing (Opus 5.5) to get it to put the most important facts first (and not bury the lede). It loves to park the main point far away after intermediate clauses. It always writes “premise, so consequence.” It takes a prompt asking to review against rules in context for it to fix it.
The ‘concise’ output style setting is bad with Opus 5.5, as it will often spit out a cryptic (is this really English?!), allergic-to-commas concise response, which takes more time to parse.
Oh it loves to bury a lede.
Then 3 back and forths later, your computer explodes, and claude has the cheek to point out when questioned that it did warn you.
I was using opus5.5 for everything but since I tried google Argon4 that has been my favorite for writing. It’s clear and to the point.
Some of the page is also just wrong.
Except it turns out that at least one of those things is because I didn't enable JS, and the static text is wrong!
(Turning on JS did not actually help, because then the page is filled with horrible, cheesy animations and I can't actually read any of it.)